To mark this event, the Kinsey Institute is holding a year-long celebration. Much of the celebration is what you would expect: commemorative lectures, special publications, interdisciplinary seminars. Quite a lot of it, however, is the sort of thing that few other state-funded institutions would dare. In addition to the more standard fare, the Institute is offering a nude play, exhibits by Planned Parenthood, the feminist play The Vagina Monologues, and something called the “Bloomington Breast Project.” (Don’t ask.)

Kinsey would have been proud. His mid-century studies of human sexuality — Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and its companion, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) — are widely credited with paving the way for the Sexual Revolution, gay rights and compulsory sex education. If the celebration now occurring in Indiana is any indication, the Institute that bears his name is still in the front line of the “progressive” sexual movement.

But before rushing out to buy a ticket for Bloomington, it may be worth considering what’s actually being celebrated there. It has long been known that Alfred Kinsey hid more than a few skeletons in his closet — including scrupulously documented staff orgies, mandatory wife-swapping, and on-campus sadomasochism. Only recently, however, have the particulars of Kinsey’s bizarre and dangerous life been fully revealed to the public in all their sordid detail.

Kinsey didn’t just study sex; he was consumed by it. Over the course of his career as sex researcher, he measured thousands of sexual organs, kept a fascinated watch — and reams of statistics — on the human orgasm, and singlehandedly invented science porn as a distinct film genre (Kinsey’s films, numbering in the thousands, are still held by Indiana University). Slowly but surely, these “scientific” interests seeped into Kinsey’s private life. By middle age, Kinsey had become an adept of “urethral insertion” (he preferred toothbrushes), regularly frequented public toilets, and once circumcised himself with a pen knife on a whim. In other words, the father of modern “sexology” was raving mad.

All of this is highly embarrassing for the guardians of the Kinsey cult. But even more embarrassing is what Kinsey put in his books. In a much discussed passage in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey provides a table detailing rates of pre-pubescent male orgasm with accompanying discussion. It is frightening — indeed, sinister — stuff. How, it has been asked, did Kinsey come by his data without actually raping (or condoning the rape of) children?

Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft knows a PR disaster when he sees one. According to Bancroft, the hundreds of children discussed by Kinsey were all abused by the same man. “I decided,” Bancroft recently assured Institute members, “to check on the sources of this information and found that, without any doubt, all of the information reported [in Kinsey’s statistical tables] came from the carefully documented records of one man. From until the time that Kinsey interviewed him in the mid-1940s, this man had kept notes on a vast array of sexual experiences, involving not only children but adults of both sexes.”

While it’s not clear why Bancroft thinks that the number of Kinsey’s informants is of interest, his attempt at damage control raises a question of its own: If there was only one informant, who was he? Bancroft will only say that he is long dead. Others — and, in particular, long-time Kinsey Institute critic Judith Reisman — claim that Kinsey’s informant was none other than Dr. Fritz von Balluseck, a Nazi collaborator and Kinsey admirer who supplied the celebrated doctor with figures on the “experiments” he conducted in German-occupied Eastern Europe. After the War, Balluseck rounded off his career by being convicted of sexually abusing young girls. Whether or not Balluseck was the exclusive source of Kinsey’s figures, it is clear that America’s foremost sex doctor kept some very bad company indeed.

Of course, Kinsey Institute defenders are quick to point out that Kinsey’s fame rests not on his methods or personal life but on his “discoveries.” After all, had it not been for Kinsey’s research, we might still be living in the bad old days of puritanism and sexual repression. Thanks to the good doctor, we are now “liberated.” And isn’t that something to celebrate?

Well, no. Kinsey’s sexual philosophy was at once radically individualistic and profoundly anti-social. Kinsey taught that there was no fundamental distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality, that human sexual life begins at birth (often seen as a justification for pedophilia), and that monogamy is contrary to human nature. In short, all is permitted; human sexual desire is what you make of it. Convinced by his own bad science — much of Kinsey’s statistics, it turns out, depend upon studies of prostitutes and criminals, hardly the most representative samples of the human species — Kinsey proceeded to draw the horrible lesson in his own life.

His legacy has been to ensure that that same lesson is drawn in ours. It has often been charged that Kinsey’s vision of human sexuality is amoral. This is wrong. Kinsey’s idea of sex was in fact profoundly immoral. By abusing science to undermine well-established standards of appropriate sexuality, the Sexual Revolution that Kinsey inspired promised to “liberate” the individual from the tyranny of communal norms — as that old 60s platitude has it, only through the free exploration of sexual desire can you discover your “true self.”

But this is to ignore a crucial truth: individual identity, like sexual morality, is inseparable from a social context of rights and obligations. By denying the social dimension of human sexuality, Kinsey turned sex against society. Thanks to Kinsey and those who followed him, sex became meaningless, bestial, and profoundly narcissistic — in short, something you did, not as a member of society, but in spite of society.

No wonder the champions of today’s gender-studies movement so often present themselves as revolutionaries. The sexual revolution inspired by Kinsey was ready-made for the radical left. By converting young people to the mantra of sexual “liberation,” Kinsey’s work seduced a generation into believing that their happiness was radically at odds with the maintenance of traditional social authority.

To judge by the “sex positive” image they present, the people at the Kinsey Institute think this a good thing. For those who don’t share their hostility to traditional morality, however, it has been an unmitigated disaster. As a direct consequence of the sexual revolution, the past 30 years have witnessed an exploding rate of illegitimacy, divorce, sexual perversity, and rape. If our society is weaker today than ever before, it’s in no small measure due to Kinsey’s efforts.

And yet the celebrations now occurring at the University of Indiana are only part of what’s shaping up to be something of a Kinsey renaissance. If all goes as planned, 2003 will witness a massive effort to revive the myth of Saint Kinsey. This effort has already begun at Indiana University, where unsuspecting taxpayers are funding a yearlong celebration of the great man’s “achievements.” Hollywood will soon be following suit with a celebration of its own: according to recent reports, Liam Neeson is slated to star in a new film billed as the life story of this “pioneering sex researcher and social reformer.”

No doubt we shall all be more “liberated” as a consequence. All the worse for us.